Diebold voting machines

Remember Diebold, the company whose CEO promised to "help Ohio deliver its electoral votes" to Bush? Perhaps we're learning how. Black Box Voting has discovered a backdoor in the Diebold vote tabulators:

"Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator -- 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time."

By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.

...The GEMS central tabulator program is incorrectly designed and highly vulnerable to fraud. Election results can be changed in a matter of seconds. Part of the program we examined appears to be designed with election tampering in mind." [Emphasis added.]

I've just searched Google News and Yahoo News for"Diebold tabulator." Although Black Box Voting released this nine days ago, among the"major" (print & TV) media, only the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune have picked up this story. (CNN did mention it in their Daily Blog Roundup, but that's hardly front page coverage.) I learned about it from The Inquirer, a computer news site in the UK.

For more commentary, please see McBlog.